i've following this thread for a while and recently also purchased the musiland md-10 from ifiaudio. i'm not really a head-fi person, so most of my listening is through my totem mite speakers + nad stereo receiver setup connected to my computer.
i agree with most of you that the build quality of musiland md-10 dac seems quite decent. the only exception is the optical cable that came in the box. it is extremely cheaply made. when i first plugged it into the toslink (torx) jack on the back of musiland dac, the connector pin of the optical cable came off and was stuck inside the jack!!! i had to use a plyer to gently pull the pin connector out and plug it back into the cable. nothing was damaged, but i also wasn't expecting the connector pin of the optical cable to come off on the first use. oh well, i've packed that optical cable back in the box and used my own "better" optical cable instead.
regarding the sound, it's definitely an improvement over the low-fi built-in sound chip on my motherboard. you hear a much fuller sound with much weightier bass. for those of you connecting this dac to a computer, which connection are you using, usb or optical? i'm currently using the usb connection, but spent a little time last night comparing the sound quality through both the usb and the optical out from the sound chip. i find the sound through usb much fuller with better bass, but i find the sound though optical out to have slightly better resolution? maybe it's because the bass wasn't as weighty as through usb, the leaner sound gave the impression of higher resolution. which one do you guys prefer? usb or optical?
one question though. i'm listening to mostly high quality aac/mp4 files, obviously not as good as lossless files, but still better than mp3. i use itune as my player. i noticed that on the dac display, when i'm using optical connection, all pcm streams are at 48 khz. on the other hand, when i'm using usb connection, the display is showing only 44.1 khz. maybe this is why i thought the optical out had slightly higher resolution than the usb? i experimented with this a little bit. i tried using microsoft media player to play back the files instead, and noticed that some files are playing back at 48 khz through usb, while others are playing back at 44.1 khz. upon further investigation, i think the play back sampling rate through usb is based upon how the files were encoded. ones encoded at 48 khz will play back at 48 khz through usb, while ones encoded at 44.1 khz will only play back at 44.1 khz through usb. however, when playing through optical out, everything is played back at 48 khz regardless of how the file was encoded. also when using itunes, everything is played back at 44.1 khz through usb, and 48 khz through optical. anyone more experienced at this want to explain how all this work? how can i get everything to play back at 48 khz through usb?
thanks.